Numerous electrical appliances, such as televisions, video recorders or high-fidelity systems, are controlled by remote controls.
An appliance is delivered together with a remote control. However, it is not uncommon for the user, through negligence or accidentally, to damage his remote control, thereby requiring the latter's replacement.
A first solution consists in obtaining a remote control from the manufacturer of the relevant appliance. However, such spare remote controls are not always available in stock and are, for the user, expensive to purchase.
This is because the remote controls, using infrared transmission to modify this or that function, employ a coding which is individual to each appliance, within one and the same make. A remote control is therefore specific to a particular appliance.
It is known practice, especially through documents U.S. Pat. No. 5,654,714 and EP-A-0 577 267, to produce an adaptable remote control which contains the control codes for a certain number of appliances. Access to each control code is effected by keying into the keypad of the remote control unit a specific digital or alphanumeric code of at least four characters. Therefore, in order to select the control code for an appliance, one needs to employ a voluminous leaflet identifying the codes for accessing the various control codes. Apart from the difficulty in searching for and selecting the codes, the loss of the leaflet renders any subsequent configuring of the remote control difficult to carry out.